A free open-source participatory democracy for cities and organizations
The Barcelona City Council decided to bet on participatory democracy to consolidate democratic culture and strengthen the social fabric of one of the fastest-growing tech hubs in Europe.
In order to accomplish that, they looked at what the Madrid city council had in place, and initially, they wanted to adapt it to Barcelona. The original developers of the Madrid platform recommended us to do the project, and so it began.
After trying to adapt the original platform, we realized that there were some architectural flaws that resulted in very low upgrade rate —every new installation required forking the project, and ended up almost never incorporating upstream changes and security updates. It had been a project designed for a specific city council, and naturally, it wasn't as well suited to expansion to other councils and institutions.
And so we decided to go back to the drawing board: we built a new platform from the ground up with maintainability, extensibility and customization in mind. After releasing it under an open-source license, we continue to lead the contributions of more than 50+ community contributors. It has been now adopted by 30+ cities and 20+ other regional institutions and federations all over the world, some of them with customizations to better suit their own unique processes.
Company type
Participatory Democracy, Public Sector
Solution
Product development
Software Architecture & Development
Outcome
Huge adoption after launch (30 cities, 6 regional institutions, 15 federations), high update rates, 50+ open-source contributors
Location
Barcelona, Spain
Technologies
Ruby on RailsA free open-source participatory democracy for cities and organizations
The Barcelona City Council decided to bet on participatory democracy to consolidate democratic culture and strengthen the social fabric of one of the fastest-growing tech hubs in Europe.
In order to accomplish that, they looked at what the Madrid city council had in place, and initially, they wanted to adapt it to Barcelona. The original developers of the Madrid platform recommended us to do the project, and so it began.
After trying to adapt the original platform, we realized that there were some architectural flaws that resulted in very low upgrade rate —every new installation required forking the project, and ended up almost never incorporating upstream changes and security updates. It had been a project designed for a specific city council, and naturally, it wasn't as well suited to expansion to other councils and institutions.
And so we decided to go back to the drawing board: we built a new platform from the ground up with maintainability, extensibility and customization in mind. After releasing it under an open-source license, we continue to lead the contributions of more than 50+ community contributors. It has been now adopted by 30+ cities and 20+ other regional institutions and federations all over the world, some of them with customizations to better suit their own unique processes.
Company type
Participatory Democracy, Public Sector
Solution
Product development
Software Architecture & Development
Outcome
Huge adoption after launch (30 cities, 6 regional institutions, 15 federations), high update rates, 50+ open-source contributors
Location
Barcelona, Spain
Technologies
Ruby on Rails